I want to describe that night to you, because it was the happiest in my life. You must remember that for a long time I had been suffering under a strain so cruel that my nerves and brain were bruised and quivering. The sea—the stars—space! They brought me solace.
I remember leaning over the rail and looking down at the sea; it was saturated with stars and moonlight. It seemed to me that I became part of what I looked at. Does that convey anything to you? I was released from myself. I had got rid of myself. I had become renewed.... It is impossible, my dear friend, for me to describe what change took place in me for that one night. It was a sudden cessation of pain, a freeing of the soul, an accession of power. Illusion, no doubt—I mean the consciousness of power. If I had been Zeus himself——!
At all events, no sleep came to me that night: I wanted neither sleep nor rest. I was not going to Judith, for Judith already was with me. She was with me more closely that night than she ever was, though I married her. My mind was full of poets’ phrases: “His silver skin laced with his golden blood”: lines from “Annabel Lee”: the “magic casements” of Keats: some stupendous things from Whitman. These did not tease or worry me: they were like the potent delicate fumes of a drug. All life was poetry: there was no possible interpretation of life except the romantic interpretation. Happiness lay not in gathering and garnering beauty, but in surrendering oneself to beauty. And, in a burst, Wagner’s “Tristan” rushed flood-like upon me; I was drowned in its pleasure-pain——
Well, he died. He was dead when I arrived at Salonika. The news gave me no pleasure, for what had happened I had known would happen.
Madame de Stran received me.
“You look ill,” she said; “or perhaps you are tired?”
I made her sit down and tell me all she knew about Judith.
“I wish to God she had never borne him a child!” I said, when she told me she had seen a photograph of the baby taken just before the illness from which it died.
“He was very like his father: dark, misshapen, vulpine,” said Madame.
“Don’t speak of him. The father and the child are dead: only she remains. Has she any close friends in Salonika?”